Deferred Chiller Maintenance Comes With Hidden Costs
Monday, February 1st, 2010
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Chiller maintenance deferred is chiller maintenance denied. We’ve all heard stories about delaying or rescheduling maintenance procedures that we once did without a second thought when the economy wasn’t…well, lousy. You probably dismiss as urban legend the horror stories about failed chillers and clogged coils leading to catastrophic incidents. Sadly, they are true.
There are lots of reasons why important tasks like chiller maintenance might be put off . They range from “We don’t have the manpower right now because we’re all busy with project X,” to “I really hate that job because I can’t stand wearing a respirator and rubber gloves,” to the ever popular “We just can’t afford it this quarter, we’re already over our budget.”
Our reply is “You can’t afford not to do it”.
A too-little-used term in this business is “first-level failure”. In general, this is when a mechanical system begins operating outside of normal parameters. A good example would be a chiller with just a little bit of fouling in its coils. First-level failure in this case, according to process-cooling.com, will be characterized by several subtle and unnoticed, conditions:
elevated compressor head pressure
poor airflow through the coils
increased power consumption
reduction in true cooling tonnage capacity
Increased compressor cycling
None of these are good. They start out slow and their effect on your overall system may be negligible. But as time goes on, the effect becomes more and more pronounced. If you keep daily maintenance logs – and you should be – you’ll see the trends in your figures on power consumption and operating pressures.
Sooner or later, if you put off maintenance long enough, you will have a failure. If you are lucky only the chiller will fail, causing you to incur the costs of repairing it and whatever it costs you in lost production time. If you are unlucky, whatever your chiller was keeping cool will also fail. Deferring maintenance doesn’t make the need for it go away. All it means is that your chiller expenses will rise and the chiller will chill less as the likelihood of a failure increases.
For what it’s worth, the way to look at the question of chiller – or any building system – maintenance is not what it will cost to do it, but rather what it will cost if you don’t.
Rich Silverman
Goodway Blogging Team
Image by Dieder Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons Under a Creative Commons Generic License
